[chubot]

Wow, for me Winamp was one of the first "enshittified" pieces of software.

I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something

I remember I used to use http://oldversion.com [1] to download the previous one

Ever since then I have been wary of "improvements" that make software worse, which has been happening a lot recently.

I'd be really interested in seeing the source code to the original. I didn't know much about programming then, and to me that would be similar to reading the original source code of Doom (which I've done a bit)

[1] this site still seems alive? But doesn't even have https?

[lmm]

> I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something

Winamp 3 was a major regression that sparked a backlash (in particular it had a new skin engine that probably was a priori better, but broke compatibility all existing skins, which wasn't popular; also performance, which had been a major selling point, was worse), but I don't remember there being any change of ownership or monetization effort. I think it was just a genuine well-intentioned rewrite that ended up worse than the original, like Netscape 4 or KDE4.

[willywanker]

WA3 was an AOL production so of course it sucked. Buggy out of the box and introduced the media library feature. Version 5 fixed it. Also best part is the media library and extra features were themselves written as plugins so if you didn't want the feature you could disable it and use it just as a simple player.